Read The Guardian's article about the discovery here. And if you want to see this work staged, there's a website detailing the efforts to try to make that happen.
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| Song and dance man? |
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Raymond the Librettist
Holy double-crossing dames! Writer Kim Cooper recently discovered that famed noir novelist Raymond Chandler wrote a libretto for a proposed operetta "The Princess and the Pedlar."
Read The Guardian's article about the discovery here. And if you want to see this work staged, there's a website detailing the efforts to try to make that happen.
Read The Guardian's article about the discovery here. And if you want to see this work staged, there's a website detailing the efforts to try to make that happen.
Monday, November 24, 2014
(We Can't) Stop Talking About Monsters (Already!)
Listen buster, a good article about the less popular creeps from horror writing is not going to escape our attention. Neither will it escape yours. Here's a little taste:
"Next time you need to name check a novel about a prostitute impregnated with the sperm of a hanged man by a mad geneticist so that she gives birth to a vengeful nymphomaniac written by a homosexual Nazi, you’ll be glad we had this chat."
JW McCormack wrote the piece and it taught us several things about monsters we thought we knew, and clued us in to some reading material we are now obligated to seek out.
Read "31 Fairly Obscure Literary Monsters" and chances are we'll be fighting you for the last copy of Ambrose Bierce's The Damned Thing at the library.
Now, look at this cat:
"Next time you need to name check a novel about a prostitute impregnated with the sperm of a hanged man by a mad geneticist so that she gives birth to a vengeful nymphomaniac written by a homosexual Nazi, you’ll be glad we had this chat."
JW McCormack wrote the piece and it taught us several things about monsters we thought we knew, and clued us in to some reading material we are now obligated to seek out.
Read "31 Fairly Obscure Literary Monsters" and chances are we'll be fighting you for the last copy of Ambrose Bierce's The Damned Thing at the library.
Now, look at this cat:
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Cliff's Notes For Dummies, Ya Dummy!
Forgive us for just discovering Better Book Titles, the Tumblr that sums up classic literature by re-titling the books with, well, take a look at the Halloween set and you'll get the idea.
[Hat tip to Hark A Vagrant's Tumblr.]
[Hat tip to Hark A Vagrant's Tumblr.]
Friday, August 22, 2014
Howard and Ray
The American writer of weird fiction, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, would have been 124 years old on Aug 20, if here were still alive. And who knows, maybe he is? The mythology he created has become so deeply ingrained in the fantasy and horror cannon, it might as well be scripture -- or, y'know, the truth.
Look at this great cover for one of his more terrifying novellas The Dunwich Horror:
Check out this vintage cover art for Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's loaded with intrigue and hints of unforseen danger:
WINDHAND - "Orchard" (Official Video) from Relapse Records on Vimeo.
[Editor's note: We're trying to track down the names of the artists who painted those book covers. If we can find them, we'll give credit.]
Look at this great cover for one of his more terrifying novellas The Dunwich Horror:
The water color inks and psychedelic slant of the artwork reflects the story quite well, with beings that defy Earthly biology and cosmic magic that's only hinted at in the dark bottom portion of the cover. Read some Lovecraft, will ya?
A nice complement to this news is that Aug 22 is Ray Bradbury's birthday. Unlike Lovecraft's bleak, sometimes depressing horror, Bradbury had an inhuman gift for balancing moments of terror with genuine sweetness.
His work stands acts like a boilerplate for many screenwriters and filmmakers who have attempted (and a few succeeded, though never quite like Bradbury) at tapping into the mind of gentle, introspective protagonists thrust into unbelievable situations.
His work stands acts like a boilerplate for many screenwriters and filmmakers who have attempted (and a few succeeded, though never quite like Bradbury) at tapping into the mind of gentle, introspective protagonists thrust into unbelievable situations.
Check out this vintage cover art for Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's loaded with intrigue and hints of unforseen danger:
If neither of these makes you want to read even one short story from either of these authors, well buddy, you're on the wrong end of the internets.
Let's close this catch-up post with a bit of music appropriate to the topic. Windand formed in 2009, a five-piece playing stoner/doom metal with a real gift for atmosphere and bluster. The quintet wields dynamics for more than just sonic impact, with a gift for shading and mood that falls from the grasp of many bands working in those genres.
Their latest album Soma, was released nearly a year ago. And now there's a video for the song "Orchard." The visuals work well with the song, and demonstrate a great re-purposing of (what we assume is) public domain footage with newly photographed sequences. Let's get eerie:
WINDHAND - "Orchard" (Official Video) from Relapse Records on Vimeo.
[Editor's note: We're trying to track down the names of the artists who painted those book covers. If we can find them, we'll give credit.]
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Six
Tuesday Jan 21, 2014 was The Typing Monkey's sixth anniversary ... or birthday? What do you call the day that marks another year of blogging into the wind? Right. "Pointless." Very good.
[At this point in the conversation, our intern Kim was asked to clock out for the day. "Clock out? I don't even get paid," he said. Kim. Kim, c'mon. -- ed.]
To celebrate, we punish you with links culled from Arts & Letters Daily, our ongoing source of quality journalism, editorials and critical thinking that helps us remember there's more to this technology than bewbs and horror movie trailers.
"We need to talk about TED" by Benjamin Bratton
... in which a man gives a TED talk that points out everything wrong with TED talks. It's like he's saying what we're thinking.
"No, Jane Austen Was Not a Game Theorist" by William Deresiewicz
[At this point in the conversation, our intern Kim was asked to clock out for the day. "Clock out? I don't even get paid," he said. Kim. Kim, c'mon. -- ed.]
To celebrate, we punish you with links culled from Arts & Letters Daily, our ongoing source of quality journalism, editorials and critical thinking that helps us remember there's more to this technology than bewbs and horror movie trailers.
"We need to talk about TED" by Benjamin Bratton
... in which a man gives a TED talk that points out everything wrong with TED talks. It's like he's saying what we're thinking.
"No, Jane Austen Was Not a Game Theorist" by William Deresiewicz
... a call to resist and reject the post-Freakonomics/Gladwell trend in literary and art criticism to assert that modern, often trendy, scientific theories and ideas are the real themes and subtexts of many great works of art, history be damned.
"The Paratext's the Thing" by Thomas Doherty
"The irritating distractions have morphed into the main attractions."
Perhaps the thematic thread that connects these editorials is just in our imagination. But we think they're complementary.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Peering Into the Dark: Lovecraft’s Great Depression
Once again, we gave TMI custodian Kris Kendall the assignment the rest of us were too lazy to tackle: Read a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories. Lovecraft's reputation makes for a daunting task, but in a surprise only slightly bigger than our realization that Kendall can read and write, the smelly bastard actually had something to say.
Read the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft during the dreary month of January.
The stories by the “godfather of modern horror” echo the long, dark, cold and soggy stretch of the first month of the year, when the carnival of the holiday season has left town. Bleakness rules all in January, and it’s the defining tone of Lovecraft’s work.
Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates, comes highly recommended and there’s good reason for that.
Her curation of the shorts and novellas builds logically, beginning with the “The Outsider” – a sort of character study that has been imitated so many times, it nearly suffers from its own influence.
Which isn’t to say it’s a bad story – on the contrary, Lovecraft builds to his big (obvious to modern readers) reveal skillfully, like a waltz for the doomed that ends in ugly, minor chords meant to shock and horrify.
Then the real recurring themes of what people think of as “Lovecraftian” begins with “The Music of Erich Zann” and “Rats in the Walls.”
The former introduces the idea that there are other worlds, other dimensions, near our own and that the barrier between them is thin, perhaps easily breached. While the latter introduces a theme that Lovecraft returns to in subsequent works: family lineage.
He writes of ancestry that reaches so far back in time that our brains can scarcely grasp the distance. And in that distance are ugly behaviors, ugly genetics, that ripple forward into the modern world.
“The Shunned House” – at least in the Oates collection – acts as a sort of rest stop before the big, well-known stories begin. And we’d argue that it’s a lesser tale, but it left too much of an impression. However, “Shunned” illuminates the major problem with Lovecraft: he rambles and repeats himself.
Like Charles Dickens and, to a lesser degree, Lovecraft's predecessor in horror, Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft writes as if he were paid by the word. He was. “Shunned” exposes the Lovecraft novice to the author’s tendency toward unnecessary length in pursuit of a bigger paycheck.
Lovecraft’s garrulous narrative is absent entirely from “The Call of Cthulhu.” The story was published in 1926, four years before Lovecraft would begin corresponding with fellow Weird Tales contributor Robert E. Howard. But it’s reasonable to aver that Lovecraft was reading Howard’s work by then. Perhaps Howard’s electric, two-fisted prose influenced the efficiency of “Cthulhu.”
Structured like the classic Victorian horror tales, “Cthulhu” begins with the declaration that it was “found among the papers of the late Frances Wayland Thurston, of Boston.” The opening paragraph stands as one of the best passages in this collection, a concise portent of what is to come, but also a clever assessment of why humankind seems incapable of advancing very far before collapsing.
Part murder mystery and part action yarn, “Cthulhu” introduces everything that would come be known as what Lovecraft associate and superfan, August Derleth, called “ the Cthulhu Mythos.” There are ancient cults worshiping a beast straight out of Revelations, global conspiracies in place to deny the existence of those cults, and geometry so otherworldly, that human senses can’t properly perceive it.
Ringing, siren-like, above it all is the nightmare realization that beings from across the galaxy, and often from worlds outside our own universe, have been to Earth – some of them are still here, waiting for the right conditions to rise up again and snuff us out like spent matches.
Lovecraft revisits that idea repeatedly with “The Dunwich Horror,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Shadow Out of Time.” In doing so, he expands his rogues gallery, subtly but methodically linking his beasts by showing how they fit together into a history pre-dating, and later concomitant to, our own journey out of the cave and into the false security of civilization.
But for all the monsters and mythology, an equal amount of the dread that permeates Lovecraft’s writing comes from his doomed heroes. In fact, his protagonists rarely qualify as heroes, as many of them end up dead, or mad, and always along the way, fall headlong into the deep isolation that comes with the knowledge they acquire.
Without having read a proper biography of Lovecraft, it’s pure speculation that the man was probably depressed through most of his life. At the very least he was deeply cynical about the world – for he outright states multiple times that humans are not nearly so advanced or evolved as we like to think. If we don’t destroy ourselves first, there are plenty of outside forces just waiting for an opportunity to do the job for us.
He illustrates that anxiety well in “The Colour Out of Space.” The story concerns a New England farmer, in the rural hills west of Arkham, a stand-in for Salem, Massachusetts. A meteorite lands in the fields of the farm and poisons everything it touches, including the minds of the farmer and his family.
In pure book report terms: The corrosive power of a cosmic force could easily stand in for events in our mundane lives that are sometimes unbearable, and like the dying, mad farmer of “The Colour ...” those things can destroy us. But for some reason, or lack of reason, we are drawn to the destructive agents.
Lovecraft himself had what is described as a “nervous breakdown” before he graduated high school. Both his father and mother had similar events and both died within a few years of those breakdowns, though neither died as a direct result of the breakdown.
Knowing that fact makes the reading of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” a more potent experience. The story of an isolated fishing village in Massachusetts probably best embodies Lovecraft’s pet idea of family history and biology working in tandem to cast our fates in stone. None of us has progressed far past our ancestors.
But let’s leave the analysis for greater minds because “Innsmouth” is a ripping good tale. It’s the kind of creepshow dread that The X-Files did so well. An educated city dweller ventures into the rural unknown, where his status as an outsider is immediately recognized and used against him.
The last third of the story has more of that “Call of Cthulhu” action – an escape scene that takes up an entire night, where the simple task of leaving becomes nearly impossible.
And that brings us back to the beginning. No matter what T.S. Eliot says, January is the cruelest month. The nights are long, the days are dark. Cold and wet rule the forecast. February is January’s petulant little sister, so don’t worry if your journey into H.P. Lovecraft’s writing spills over into the weeks of Valentines and alleged whispers of spring. The terror is there to keep you company.
Read the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft during the dreary month of January.
Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates, comes highly recommended and there’s good reason for that.
Which isn’t to say it’s a bad story – on the contrary, Lovecraft builds to his big (obvious to modern readers) reveal skillfully, like a waltz for the doomed that ends in ugly, minor chords meant to shock and horrify.
Then the real recurring themes of what people think of as “Lovecraftian” begins with “The Music of Erich Zann” and “Rats in the Walls.”
The former introduces the idea that there are other worlds, other dimensions, near our own and that the barrier between them is thin, perhaps easily breached. While the latter introduces a theme that Lovecraft returns to in subsequent works: family lineage.
He writes of ancestry that reaches so far back in time that our brains can scarcely grasp the distance. And in that distance are ugly behaviors, ugly genetics, that ripple forward into the modern world.
“The Shunned House” – at least in the Oates collection – acts as a sort of rest stop before the big, well-known stories begin. And we’d argue that it’s a lesser tale, but it left too much of an impression. However, “Shunned” illuminates the major problem with Lovecraft: he rambles and repeats himself.
Like Charles Dickens and, to a lesser degree, Lovecraft's predecessor in horror, Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft writes as if he were paid by the word. He was. “Shunned” exposes the Lovecraft novice to the author’s tendency toward unnecessary length in pursuit of a bigger paycheck.
Lovecraft’s garrulous narrative is absent entirely from “The Call of Cthulhu.” The story was published in 1926, four years before Lovecraft would begin corresponding with fellow Weird Tales contributor Robert E. Howard. But it’s reasonable to aver that Lovecraft was reading Howard’s work by then. Perhaps Howard’s electric, two-fisted prose influenced the efficiency of “Cthulhu.”
Structured like the classic Victorian horror tales, “Cthulhu” begins with the declaration that it was “found among the papers of the late Frances Wayland Thurston, of Boston.” The opening paragraph stands as one of the best passages in this collection, a concise portent of what is to come, but also a clever assessment of why humankind seems incapable of advancing very far before collapsing.
Part murder mystery and part action yarn, “Cthulhu” introduces everything that would come be known as what Lovecraft associate and superfan, August Derleth, called “ the Cthulhu Mythos.” There are ancient cults worshiping a beast straight out of Revelations, global conspiracies in place to deny the existence of those cults, and geometry so otherworldly, that human senses can’t properly perceive it.
Ringing, siren-like, above it all is the nightmare realization that beings from across the galaxy, and often from worlds outside our own universe, have been to Earth – some of them are still here, waiting for the right conditions to rise up again and snuff us out like spent matches.
Lovecraft revisits that idea repeatedly with “The Dunwich Horror,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Shadow Out of Time.” In doing so, he expands his rogues gallery, subtly but methodically linking his beasts by showing how they fit together into a history pre-dating, and later concomitant to, our own journey out of the cave and into the false security of civilization.
But for all the monsters and mythology, an equal amount of the dread that permeates Lovecraft’s writing comes from his doomed heroes. In fact, his protagonists rarely qualify as heroes, as many of them end up dead, or mad, and always along the way, fall headlong into the deep isolation that comes with the knowledge they acquire.
 |
| Inside joke! |
He illustrates that anxiety well in “The Colour Out of Space.” The story concerns a New England farmer, in the rural hills west of Arkham, a stand-in for Salem, Massachusetts. A meteorite lands in the fields of the farm and poisons everything it touches, including the minds of the farmer and his family.
In pure book report terms: The corrosive power of a cosmic force could easily stand in for events in our mundane lives that are sometimes unbearable, and like the dying, mad farmer of “The Colour ...” those things can destroy us. But for some reason, or lack of reason, we are drawn to the destructive agents.
Lovecraft himself had what is described as a “nervous breakdown” before he graduated high school. Both his father and mother had similar events and both died within a few years of those breakdowns, though neither died as a direct result of the breakdown.
Knowing that fact makes the reading of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” a more potent experience. The story of an isolated fishing village in Massachusetts probably best embodies Lovecraft’s pet idea of family history and biology working in tandem to cast our fates in stone. None of us has progressed far past our ancestors.
But let’s leave the analysis for greater minds because “Innsmouth” is a ripping good tale. It’s the kind of creepshow dread that The X-Files did so well. An educated city dweller ventures into the rural unknown, where his status as an outsider is immediately recognized and used against him.
The last third of the story has more of that “Call of Cthulhu” action – an escape scene that takes up an entire night, where the simple task of leaving becomes nearly impossible.
And that brings us back to the beginning. No matter what T.S. Eliot says, January is the cruelest month. The nights are long, the days are dark. Cold and wet rule the forecast. February is January’s petulant little sister, so don’t worry if your journey into H.P. Lovecraft’s writing spills over into the weeks of Valentines and alleged whispers of spring. The terror is there to keep you company.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Ain't Got No Head
Two very different takes on the Headless Horseman of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
First, Frank Frazetta:
That man could draw horses like few others. For real. You know why Maurice Sendak decided to use monsters in Where the Wild Things Are instead of his original plan for horses? Because he realized how hard it is to draw horses.
Second is Kate Beaton's knee-slapping script-flip of Ichabod on the run:
Read the short strip here.
[A doff of the Jack O'Lantern to Weird Tales for the Frazetta art.]
First, Frank Frazetta:
That man could draw horses like few others. For real. You know why Maurice Sendak decided to use monsters in Where the Wild Things Are instead of his original plan for horses? Because he realized how hard it is to draw horses.
Second is Kate Beaton's knee-slapping script-flip of Ichabod on the run:
Read the short strip here.
[A doff of the Jack O'Lantern to Weird Tales for the Frazetta art.]
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Dirty Deeds & the Men Who Investigate Them
Two book reviews that make us want both books in our possession:
Matthew Walther enjoyed Wretched Writing: A Compendium of Crimes Against the English Language by Ross and Kathryn Petras. The volume collects examples of head-scratching sentences from famous, and sometimes even reputable, authors. See what Walther's on about here via The Spectator.
The other comes from Josephine Livingstone, who we've tagged before, so I guess that makes us fans of her work. In her review of Bran Nicol’s The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies, Livingstone is genuinely pleased that Nicol touches on a pet theory of hers: That the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo is a retelling of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
And you know what? She's right. But it's Nicol's book she's discussing, and Livingstone gives it a scholarly scrubbing -- the kind of gimlet-eyed critical writing that doesn't happen often enough in the usual crap we read. Either way, The Private Eye sounds like catnip to us.
The other comes from Josephine Livingstone, who we've tagged before, so I guess that makes us fans of her work. In her review of Bran Nicol’s The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies, Livingstone is genuinely pleased that Nicol touches on a pet theory of hers: That the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo is a retelling of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
And you know what? She's right. But it's Nicol's book she's discussing, and Livingstone gives it a scholarly scrubbing -- the kind of gimlet-eyed critical writing that doesn't happen often enough in the usual crap we read. Either way, The Private Eye sounds like catnip to us.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Readin' Dirty
The Typing Monkey tries to keep this blog as PG-13/SFW as possible. So understand that several of the links in this post contain pictures that might get you in trouble at work, or force you to have an uncomfortable conversation with a loved one. If your wife asks what you're doing, though, you can tell her in all honesty that you're reading The Paris Review.
***
All media are used as pornography delivery devices. And because that’s usually one of the first uses for a new medium, the history of pornographic books is the history of the book itself.
Writer Avi Steinberg looked into the library/porn connection for The Paris Review back in 2012. Thanks to J. Kingston Pierce’s blog Killer Covers of the Week, we discovered Steinberg’s essay, "Checking Out" and it’s a positively fun and enlightening read.
Steinberg, who worked as a librarian in a prison, declares midway through that "according to the pile of books I’d stacked onto my library desk, our story is nothing but the evolutionary history of the Porno sapiens."
And to that end, Steinberg arrives at a perfectly logical connection. Books can satisfy our prurient needs. Therefore, those who curate the books must have arcane knowledge of the erotic and esoteric, which lets us off at the final stop on this ride, the archetype of the “sexy librarian.”
For many, the very phrase conjures a sort of post-WWII pinup idea: A prim woman, with glasses and hair coiled into a bun. But once those glasses come off, and the hair is loosed, she’s a trick-underwear-sporting tigress in sensible heels, a variation on the Madonna/whore fantasy that’s come in and out of fashion over the decades.
As poet and librarian Stephanie Brown put it in her article “Sex in the Stacks” – “In the world of librarian porn, a sex maniac lives behind the lorgnette [and] those orthopedic shoes.”
Read her take on the books, and the idea, on The Best American Poetry blog. And notice there that she too, includes the cover of Les Tucker’s Nympho Librarian, a paperback that has also provided the two images we used for this post, primarily because it’s so funny and so neatly sums up the ideas discussed.
Books are sexy. Anybody who says otherwise probably hates reading. Stop associating with those people as your schedule allows, and go read something.
***
All media are used as pornography delivery devices. And because that’s usually one of the first uses for a new medium, the history of pornographic books is the history of the book itself.
Writer Avi Steinberg looked into the library/porn connection for The Paris Review back in 2012. Thanks to J. Kingston Pierce’s blog Killer Covers of the Week, we discovered Steinberg’s essay, "Checking Out" and it’s a positively fun and enlightening read.
And to that end, Steinberg arrives at a perfectly logical connection. Books can satisfy our prurient needs. Therefore, those who curate the books must have arcane knowledge of the erotic and esoteric, which lets us off at the final stop on this ride, the archetype of the “sexy librarian.”
For many, the very phrase conjures a sort of post-WWII pinup idea: A prim woman, with glasses and hair coiled into a bun. But once those glasses come off, and the hair is loosed, she’s a trick-underwear-sporting tigress in sensible heels, a variation on the Madonna/whore fantasy that’s come in and out of fashion over the decades.
As poet and librarian Stephanie Brown put it in her article “Sex in the Stacks” – “In the world of librarian porn, a sex maniac lives behind the lorgnette [and] those orthopedic shoes.”
Read her take on the books, and the idea, on The Best American Poetry blog. And notice there that she too, includes the cover of Les Tucker’s Nympho Librarian, a paperback that has also provided the two images we used for this post, primarily because it’s so funny and so neatly sums up the ideas discussed.
Books are sexy. Anybody who says otherwise probably hates reading. Stop associating with those people as your schedule allows, and go read something.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Quiz Time: Facial Expressions & Literature
Look at these pictures of Ray Bradbury:
The black and white image was taken in 1938, when the writer was a senior at high school in Waukegan, Illinois.
The color image was snapped in 1975 after he'd already published Farenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Halloween Tree.
One of these men can stare deep into the very core of your emotional brain and memories of childhood. He can mold your sensations like a sculptor with clay, causing you to feel weird surges of sweetness and regret, triggering great joy and exhilaration, suspense and fear, conjuring melancholy you want to wrap around yourself like a blanket against the cold.
Which of these men can do this?
[To see the answer, select this text: Dude, they're both Ray Bradbury. He is a crafty genius and you should read one of his stories as soon as you can.]
The black and white image was taken in 1938, when the writer was a senior at high school in Waukegan, Illinois.
The color image was snapped in 1975 after he'd already published Farenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Halloween Tree.
One of these men can stare deep into the very core of your emotional brain and memories of childhood. He can mold your sensations like a sculptor with clay, causing you to feel weird surges of sweetness and regret, triggering great joy and exhilaration, suspense and fear, conjuring melancholy you want to wrap around yourself like a blanket against the cold.
Which of these men can do this?
[To see the answer, select this text: Dude, they're both Ray Bradbury. He is a crafty genius and you should read one of his stories as soon as you can.]
Monday, January 14, 2013
The Tinkelman Terrors
Monster Brains does it again (and again and again ...) with a Jan 8 posting of various covers and interior illustrations Murray Tinkelman did for H.P. Lovecraft (and Lovecraft-inspired) stories.
The cheerless cold and soggy dark of January is as good a time as any to read some Lovecraft. The Typing Monkey's only cracked one of his tales, and that was before the Clinton administration.
Just as we finally paid proper attention this past summer to Ray Bradbury, Howard Phillips Lovecraft is on the docket, via a lauded collection of shorts and novellas curated by Joyce Carol Oates. We're already scared.
With these Tinkelman works to inspire our eyes, the anticipation mounts. See more of Tinkelman's work here.
[Interior illustration -- duplicated on cover -- for "The Mask of Cthulhu" by August Derleth]
The cheerless cold and soggy dark of January is as good a time as any to read some Lovecraft. The Typing Monkey's only cracked one of his tales, and that was before the Clinton administration.
Just as we finally paid proper attention this past summer to Ray Bradbury, Howard Phillips Lovecraft is on the docket, via a lauded collection of shorts and novellas curated by Joyce Carol Oates. We're already scared.
With these Tinkelman works to inspire our eyes, the anticipation mounts. See more of Tinkelman's work here.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
"It is usually about murder ... "
At some point in your life, maybe not this very moment, but some time in the future, you will hear reference to Raymond Chandler's "how to write a good mystery story" guide disguised as a critical essay "The Simple Art of Murder."
You will wonder: "Have I read that?" Which means you probably haven't. Luckily, the University of Texas at Austin's American Literature Archive has made it easy to read Chandler's incisive work anywhere you have access to the Web. From 1950's ink-on-paper, to your 21st century electronic device: ta da!
And, should you care, they also have a virtual copy of Flannery O'Connor's 1960 essay "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction."
You will wonder: "Have I read that?" Which means you probably haven't. Luckily, the University of Texas at Austin's American Literature Archive has made it easy to read Chandler's incisive work anywhere you have access to the Web. From 1950's ink-on-paper, to your 21st century electronic device: ta da!
And, should you care, they also have a virtual copy of Flannery O'Connor's 1960 essay "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction."
Friday, October 26, 2012
Great Old Ones
Wanna read some H.P. Lovecraft but don't have any scratch to put toward buying new books? Or maybe your local library banned you after that unfortunate misunderstanding regarding the copy machine?
The H.P. Lovecraft Archive has you covered. A disturbingly generous selection of Howard Phillips' writings are available to you with just a couple clicks of the mouse. It's there, deep beneath the surface of the Web, undistrubed in its slumber, waiting, but still stirring a nagging feeling in the dark recesses of your mind ...
The H.P. Lovecraft Archive has you covered. A disturbingly generous selection of Howard Phillips' writings are available to you with just a couple clicks of the mouse. It's there, deep beneath the surface of the Web, undistrubed in its slumber, waiting, but still stirring a nagging feeling in the dark recesses of your mind ...
[Cthulhu image courtesy of The H.P. Lovecraft Wiki]
Friday, October 19, 2012
Ghosts Eat Marshmallows
This isn’t a book review because we haven’t been able to find a copy of this book and the last time anyone here at The Typing Monkey read The Marshmallow Ghosts by Priscill and Otto Friedrich, was too long ago to remember specific details.*
In essence, the story tracks a family of ghosts who’ve emigrated from Ireland to the United States, and the ghost kids – that’s right, ghost kids – want to experience Halloween American style. In doing so, the spirit children find that if they eat marshmallows, their ghostly vapors turn solid, allowing them to go trick-or-treating like kids who aren’t ghosts.
We bring all this up as a seasonally appropriate gateway to remind you of the illustrations (and also writing) of Louis Slobodkin. Go back to the books you read as a kid and chances are one of them was illustrated by him.
Sadly, the website dedicated to Slobodkin’s work went dark sometime during the past year, but Page Books has a fairly robust Slobodkin page with a good cover gallery.
Whether illustrating his own writing, the collaborations with his wife, or the work of others, there’s an utterly charming post-War warmth to Slobodkin’s art.
*[Sincerely, if you find a copy of The Marshmallow Ghosts snap it up. It's long out of print and we won't mind if you mail it to us.]
We bring all this up as a seasonally appropriate gateway to remind you of the illustrations (and also writing) of Louis Slobodkin. Go back to the books you read as a kid and chances are one of them was illustrated by him.
Sadly, the website dedicated to Slobodkin’s work went dark sometime during the past year, but Page Books has a fairly robust Slobodkin page with a good cover gallery.
Whether illustrating his own writing, the collaborations with his wife, or the work of others, there’s an utterly charming post-War warmth to Slobodkin’s art.
*[Sincerely, if you find a copy of The Marshmallow Ghosts snap it up. It's long out of print and we won't mind if you mail it to us.]
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Thank You, Donald J. Sobol
There are two Leroy Browns in pop history. Well, two that we know of: Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, who receives a royal beatdown within the confines of Jim Croce's jangly, loose pop hit.
The other is Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, boy detective. Encyclopedia Brown's creator, Donal J. Sobol died July 11, 2012, but the news only came to public attention the 16th. Any kid who likes to read has probably spent some time trying to solve the mysteries that Brown cracked.
The books were not only a great way to encourage readers, and critical thinking, they were also a gateway for many into other mystery-themed writing, telelvision and film.
Coolest of all is the deatil in The Washington Post's obituary for Sobol: He was still writing the books and one final Encyclopedia Brown book is due out this year.
We didn't realize how much we'll miss Sobol until now. It's too often like that.
The other is Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, boy detective. Encyclopedia Brown's creator, Donal J. Sobol died July 11, 2012, but the news only came to public attention the 16th. Any kid who likes to read has probably spent some time trying to solve the mysteries that Brown cracked.
The books were not only a great way to encourage readers, and critical thinking, they were also a gateway for many into other mystery-themed writing, telelvision and film.
Coolest of all is the deatil in The Washington Post's obituary for Sobol: He was still writing the books and one final Encyclopedia Brown book is due out this year.
We didn't realize how much we'll miss Sobol until now. It's too often like that.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Reflections of Little Green Men
Just two days before Ray Bradbury died, we read Lauren Miller's essay "The Cosmic Menagerie" from the Jun 4/Jun 11 issue of The New Yorker.
Her piece traces the earliest depictions of extra-terrestrials in literature, how those depictions reflect the cultures they were dreamt up in, and how that in turn reflects on us. You should absolutely read it.
Her writing reminded us that we have been seriously deficient in making good on promises to read more of Ray Bradbury's writing. Then the man himself departed this world for another and we felt strange about the coincidence.
Imagine our further beweirdment when we flipped forward several pages and found a short essay in the very same issue written by the Martian Chronicles author himself.
Bradbury's "Take Me Home" is exactly the kind of work that makes him an American treasure. In just one page he captures the magic and melancholy of childhood wonder like he's catching fireflies in a jar. If ever there was a link to click on, this is it.
[Edward Gorey illustration swiped from The New Yorker]
Her piece traces the earliest depictions of extra-terrestrials in literature, how those depictions reflect the cultures they were dreamt up in, and how that in turn reflects on us. You should absolutely read it.
Her writing reminded us that we have been seriously deficient in making good on promises to read more of Ray Bradbury's writing. Then the man himself departed this world for another and we felt strange about the coincidence.
Imagine our further beweirdment when we flipped forward several pages and found a short essay in the very same issue written by the Martian Chronicles author himself.
Bradbury's "Take Me Home" is exactly the kind of work that makes him an American treasure. In just one page he captures the magic and melancholy of childhood wonder like he's catching fireflies in a jar. If ever there was a link to click on, this is it.
[Edward Gorey illustration swiped from The New Yorker]
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Exit Mr. Bradbury
He had to go sometime. His short stories are always worth reading. Dig into the novels.
[Image courtesy of Poe Foreward]
Thursday, March 22, 2012
500 "Lost" Fairytales Discovered -- Countless New Band Names to Come
A volume of notes and writings by Bavarian historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth has revealed a bounty of forgotten or otherwise unknown fairytales from Europe.
Schönwerth, a contemporary of the Grimm brothers, collected numerous tales that are either distinct variants on existing stories, or entirely new stories with titles such as "King Golden Hair" and "The Turnip Princess." And perhaps this description of what might be our favorite: "the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond."
Psychedelic, metal and hip-hop musicians: Please start scooping these up for band names, album/song titles, MC monikers, and rich source material for lyrics and concept records. It's imperative you do this soon before the next generation of Decembrists knock-offs gets a hold of it.
The Guardian has more details about this incredible find.
[tip o' the wizard cap to The Fortean Times]
Schönwerth, a contemporary of the Grimm brothers, collected numerous tales that are either distinct variants on existing stories, or entirely new stories with titles such as "King Golden Hair" and "The Turnip Princess." And perhaps this description of what might be our favorite: "the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond."
Psychedelic, metal and hip-hop musicians: Please start scooping these up for band names, album/song titles, MC monikers, and rich source material for lyrics and concept records. It's imperative you do this soon before the next generation of Decembrists knock-offs gets a hold of it.
The Guardian has more details about this incredible find.
[tip o' the wizard cap to The Fortean Times]
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Oggling the Classics
Penguin Classics, a line of classic literature traditionally published as paperbacks with useful notes for the student, have been redesigning their cover artwork for a few years as part of the "Graphics Deluxe" editions.
Paul Buckley directs the art on these new printings and has been employing some of the best contemporary graphic novel artists and modern illustrators.
Many make the odd choice of putting text or dialogue from the novel on the cover, as is the case with Joe Sacco's treatment for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. It's hard to believe such a busy cover would outlast the simpler aesthetic of a previous version, but then the point of these is to create collector's items.
The more traditional, leaner, cleaner art work best not only as design, but as eye catching art. Seth's work for The Portable Dorothy Parker is great, as is the lithograph look of Tomer Hanuka's NSFW cover of De Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir.
One exception to the text-heavy look is Tom MacDonald's cover for a collection of Greek mythology retold by Robert Graves. MacDonald makes it look like a Golden Age comic book, and thanks to the nature of the material, it's a perfect match. Check out the wrap-around view to get the full effect.
And speaking of wrap-arounds, Rachel Sumpter actually embroidered a few covers, doing a dense mess of color and texture for The Wizard of Oz, and an impressionistic mural for Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows -- both worth studying.
Paul Buckley directs the art on these new printings and has been employing some of the best contemporary graphic novel artists and modern illustrators.
Many make the odd choice of putting text or dialogue from the novel on the cover, as is the case with Joe Sacco's treatment for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. It's hard to believe such a busy cover would outlast the simpler aesthetic of a previous version, but then the point of these is to create collector's items.
The more traditional, leaner, cleaner art work best not only as design, but as eye catching art. Seth's work for The Portable Dorothy Parker is great, as is the lithograph look of Tomer Hanuka's NSFW cover of De Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir.
One exception to the text-heavy look is Tom MacDonald's cover for a collection of Greek mythology retold by Robert Graves. MacDonald makes it look like a Golden Age comic book, and thanks to the nature of the material, it's a perfect match. Check out the wrap-around view to get the full effect.
And speaking of wrap-arounds, Rachel Sumpter actually embroidered a few covers, doing a dense mess of color and texture for The Wizard of Oz, and an impressionistic mural for Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows -- both worth studying.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Frankie Say: Mindless Rampage
Frankensteinia: The Frankenstein Blog. Must we explain futher? Yes, yes, nerd Frankenstein was the mad scientist's name, not the monster's. But in all fairness to popular perception, the monster IS Frankenstein. Just ask any kid. Then calm down and read this fantastic blog.
And if all that historical, cultural and sociological investigation into Frankenstein sets your brain ablaze, cool down at Frankensteinia's sister sites, Frankenstein Forever and Monster Crazy, Tumblr sites with page after glorious page of Frankensteins and other horrifying beasties, respectively.
And if all that historical, cultural and sociological investigation into Frankenstein sets your brain ablaze, cool down at Frankensteinia's sister sites, Frankenstein Forever and Monster Crazy, Tumblr sites with page after glorious page of Frankensteins and other horrifying beasties, respectively.
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| [Image courtesy Frankensteinia] |
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